Why should you care about product feed optimization?

Lengow’s Feed-Management Tool allows e-merchants to quickly and easily index their products catalogue on any e-commerce channels in the world : shopbots, marketplaces… As a matter of fact, once our clients’ product feeds are sent through these channels, they just have to optimize the feed daily in order to keep it up to date and improve their products’ SEO.

Marketplaces and Shopbot are the most commonly used e-commerce channels but have a completely different business model.

Some useful reminders:

The source feed is the file which links the merchant’s catalogue to the channels’ database. The feed includes all the required information related to the product sold : name, description, size, color, price, delivery, shipping costs, etc.

Shopbots provide customers with a list of classified offers sorted by ascending prices. If a visitor clicks on one of the offers on the list he will be redirected to the merchant’s website. With shopbots, the transaction is processed on the merchant’s website. E-retailers pay shopbots on a CPC-basis which means that every time someone clicks on its offer the merchant will pay the shopbot a small commission for bringing in a visitor on its website. The commission depends on the product category and can vary from 0.10 up to 0.50 cts per click.

Note:although some shopbot will take a percentage on the final amount of the sale there are very few shopbots that still work that way.

Marketplaces provide visitors with a list of offers from multiple sellers. As opposed to shopbots, marketplaces take care of the entire buying experience. Thus, visitors are never redirected to the merchant’s website. As a result, marketplaces make money based on their third-party sellers’ performance (CPA) by charging a percentage (usually from 8 to 15%) of the final amount of the sale.

As a matter of fact, marketplaces’ commission rates can be more expensive than shopbots’s CPC ; however marketplaces offers a no-sale no-fee basis where sales are guaranteed. Whereas with shopbots, you will pay a few cents/click to attract new visitors on your website that you will still have to convert into clients. This traffic acquisition technique is much more random and can be even more expensive in the long run if your conversion rate is too low. Remember: take a moment to think about it before!

e.g.If your conversion rate reaches 2% (that means for 100 visitors on your website only 2 of them will actually buy something) your customer acquisition cost (called CAC) will be 50 times your cost per click (CPC) because on average, you need to acquire 50 visitors to sell once.

Why worry about product feed optimization?

Well, think about it : on shopbots, it is more profitable to limit the amount of clicks that do not convert into a sale on your website and avoid paying unnecessary commissions. Whereas, on the marketplaces, you will have to carefully select and optimize the products that are the most likely to sell in front of competitors’ offer.

How to optimize your product feed?

First, you better choose the right channels according to your type of products. Your Account Manager at Lengow can help you determine which channels are the most relevant to your activity among our 1.100+ partnerships with e-commerce channels all over the world.

The 3 key steps:

Determine the amount of product you want to send in your feed:

Ideally, you will be willing to remove some products and send out only a portion of your product feed. Filtering your products in this manner will make sure you are sending out only those with the best conversion rate (and avoid useless and expensive clicks on shopbot). Obviously, you will also want to remove all products that are out of stock.

Don’t forget the field matching for each of the channels:

The classification criterion varies between different channels: some have hundreds of thousands of product categories, while others have “only” a few hundred.

In order to optimize your on-site SEO, you have to carefully categorize your products according to each channel’s own thesaurus (shopbot, marketplace or affiliation plateform).

Build optimize product title:

The success of a good product page starts with the title. Keep in mind that shopbot or marketplace visitors are “in a hurry”, so they need to see the information they need immediately. If they don’t, lots of visitors may click on your offer but very few of them will actually buy the product. A perfect title has to be clear and descriptive at first sight!

The best product title :

The best product titles are often built with the following elements :

{Product_Type}

{Brand}

{Color}

{Size} – {Packaging}

What if I run out of time to do it?

If you can’t find room in your busy schedule to optimize your feed correctly, we have a specialized team at your disposal. Our Traffic Managers can optimize your feed for you according to every channels’ specifications. Do not hesitate to contact your Account Manager about these services.

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